Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) comes to the viewer disguised as an over-the-top parody of martial arts/ kung fu movies. The characters fight with fanny packs full of blue-white aquarium pebbles, a small dog on a leash, metal pipes, pinky-fingers (bulked up with Schwarzenegger biceps), fists with hot dog fingers, googly eyes, and, in one protracted scene, stainless steel butt-plugs. About half the film involves kung fu fighting -- the movie is too long and, even if you like this sort of stuff, there's way too much of it in the movie, but it's all pretty amusing and wildly inventive. I've said the kung fu coloration is really a disguise for the film's other concerns -- in fact, the movie is about the crisis in the nuclear family, the choices that people make that define their lives, and, weirdly enough, the perpetuity of family ties. The movie also has strong conventionally existentialist themes. All of this is entangled in the metaphysics of the multi-verse, a concept that has become increasingly prevalent in fantasy films (for instance, in one excellent picture Spiderman inhabits a multi-versed). There are various versions of this idea, a speculation that emerges from quantum physics and the Schroedinger paradox that a cat in a box can be both dead and not dead at the same time. (Viewers may recall that the Coen Brothers explored this idea to a limited degree in their picture A Serious Man made in 2009.) I'll describe the notion of the multiverse as it is developed in Everything Everywhere..., a film that actually (and commendably) spends some time trying to make the idea coherent and useful to viewers. In Everything Everywhere, every decision that a character makes (or that is made for a character) takes that person down a plot-line that branches at each place where a diverging narrative pathway exists. If a character is confronted with ten important decisions in his or her life, then, that character may inhabit, at least, ten different multiverses, some of them similar to one another, but others wildly divergent. (In its not clear how important the decision must be to yield a multiverse springing from that bifurcation between chosing A or B, or, for that matter, A and not A.) In the film, the original decision or choice that motivates the action is the character Evelyn's decision to marry the feckless Waymond ("Raymond" with a lisp) in defiance of her father's objections. It doesn't really matter how many decisions are sufficient to generate multiverses because once a path has been chosen that path also branches again and again, yielding a whole fractal system of multiverses all stemming from one choice. But this simplifies because we are merely looking forward. In fact, the universe that we inhabit is the product of innumerable choices in our background, triggered by the other innumerable choices of our forebears. According to this idea, choosing and deciding are ceaseless and, therefore, an infinity of multiverses exists even with respect to one person, let alone the constellation of persons that defines a family or society. Normally, this infinity of multiverses is inaccessible to people who live amidst this vast system of branching paths and existences. In fact, to understand and experience the multiverse is to face a vast ramifying chaos that is inimical to psychic existence -- the mind fractures at the multitude of different universes and madness or paralysis ensues. Nonetheless, the film posits that some individuals can "verse-jump", this means access other universes and their alternative personalities (and attributes) that exist in those parallel worlds. Verse-jumping is accomplished by doing something so paradoxical that it is unanticipated in the structure of a universe and, therefore, creates a "stochastic instability" (to quote the movie) that allows a person to dive into a parallel universe, then, swim upstream, and emerge in another universe with some of the skills and powers acquired in the other world where, of course, the character has other traits and a different biography. The film shows some supervisory figures who have access by cell-phone and computer screens to the branching grid of adjacent multiverses -- the image of a local part of the multiverse looks like a diagram of the neural branches and synapses in the brain. The role of these supervisory monitors in the movie is unclear -- I think they are primarily a narrative device to help explain some of the more exotic developments in the plot -- and those figures gradually vanish from the film as it progresses. The paradoxical actions that unlock access to parallel multiverses are things like sticking something up your ass, peeing or shitting in public, intentionally inflicting paper cuts between your fingers, stapling a post-it note to your forehead or simply putting the wrong shoe on the wrong foot.
Of course, some multiverses are happy, glorious, resplendent places. Others are inert or almost inert -- characters appear as poorly made children's drawings or boulders or partially smashed pinatas. The majority of the multiverses are sad places in which people languish under the effects of bad decisions that they have made. Evelyn, the film's heroine, occupies a miserable universe stemming from her decision to marry Waymond. Although born in China (the doctor's sadly announce: "It's a girl. I'm sorry" when she emerges from the womb, Evelyn is now living in Simi Valley near LA and operating an underperforming and financially strapped laundromat ("the Coin Laundry" it's called). Evelyn persecutes her meek husband Waymond to the point that he has prepared divorce papers and intends to serve them on his wife. (The film is legally illiterate and endorses the old, erroneous trope that a divorce occurs when "papers are signed"). Evelyn's daughter, Joy, is a snarky and sad lesbian. (She has a perky girlfriend named Becky). Evelyn is a hard-driving "tiger mother" and she is estranged from Joy -- Joy feels that she has always been a disappointment to her mother and this perception is accurate. Complicating things further is the presence of an old Chinese man Gong-Gong who speaks Mandarin only -- he's Evelyn's father and, in fact, the fellow that objected to her marrying Waymond. The film begins with a crisis at the laundromat. Evelyn is preparing for an audit with the IRS (she's been expensing too many items) and, also, organizing a customer appreciation party for the patrons of her laundromat, most of whom are eccentric and unkind. Evelyn has too much to do and is harried to the point of exhausted distraction. She's fretting about introducing Joy's boyfriend to her traditional father and, meanwhile, the henpecked Waymond is carrying around divorce papers in his pocket. (The film is very successful in conveying Evelyn's misery -- she has too many things to do, too many duties, and all of these tasks are onerous.) Evelyn, in fact, we discover is living in a multiverse that has simply gone wrong -- it's depressing place where all of her decisions have cascaded into a torrent of chaotic unhappiness. At the IRS offices, Waymond takes Evelyn into a janitor's closet and reveals that he is a powerful agent from another multiverse. A malign power named Jobu Tupaki is threatening the entire system of the multiverse, apparently invested with enough malevolent power to blow the whole thing into fragmentary chaos. Waymond demands that Evelyn assist him battling against Jobu Tupaki, a villain whose weird name Evelyn can't even pronounce. Needless to say the conference with the officious bureaucrat Miss Deirdre (portrayed in remarkable performance by Jamie Lee Curtis) goes badly wrong. Miss Deirdre in another universe is a minion of Jobu Tupaki and series of wild fights ensues with Evelyn gradually learning the "verse-jump" so as to access other selves with impressive kung fu skills. Deirdre is overweight and frumpy wearing a ill-fitting clothes in nauseating baby-shit colors, but she's also a formidable foe.
The plot is very complex and sometimes extremely funny, but it's all too excessive and, after a while, as in all kung fu movies, the ceaseless leaping, parrying, and karate-chopping becomes tedious. As the story progresses, we learn that Jobu Tupaki is embodied by Joy, Evelyn's unhappy lesbian daughter. Joy is a nihilist. She has put everything imaginable on a giant bagel and that bit of boiled bread has opened an abyss in the multiverse that threatens to swallow the whole vast galaxy of universes. (When you put everything on bagel, you get destructive, proliferating, nihilistic chaos -- this is world imagined by Joy as properly defying her mother's overly organized and schematically disciplined existence.) Of course, Joy must be defeated, although her mother can't be compelled to kill her. All of the characters ultimately gather in the last half-hour for a series of titanic fistfights punctuated with odd, rather cloying speeches about the importance of family and family ties. Everything ends happily and, even, the sadistic IRS auditor, Deirde, is liberated from the nightmare bureaucratic multiverse in which she is trapped. I don't know of many films that have, as their happy ending, the IRS granting an extension on a pending audit.
The film has many thought-provoking passages. The notion the multiverse seems an allegorical representation of psychic reality of immigrants (and other outsiders) who have to code-switch between different systems of discourse. Ms. Deirdre's marking on a laundromat receipt that she challenges, a fiercely drawn circle around the questioned charge (it's for a karaoke machine), mimics the giant jet-black bagel that annihilates by dragging everything into its hole. Some of the multiverses are extremely odd or grotesque -- in one everyone has useless hotdogs for fingers and people play Clair de Lune on the piano with their toes; inhabitants of that multiverse make love by eating each others hot dog digits. In another universe, the Pixar movie Ratatouille has been mispronounced as Racconcoonerie and features raccoons manipulating chefs by riding on their heads -- Waymond particularly loves this multiverse, which includes Randy Newman doing voices and crooning the theme song, and a subplot involves his attempts to rescue his beloved raccoon. Ultimately, the film founders on its sentimentality -- it wants desperately to be another multiverse movie, George Capra's It's a Wonderful Life or, even, Dickens "A Christmas Carol", a story with a similar premise. The film endorses the idea that "we must be kind especially when we don't know what's going on" -- which in the wildly paradoxical multiverse is always the case. The film's core amplifies Joy's nihilism: because every decision matters to create a new, complete and fully articulated multiverse, nothing really matters -- it's all an incomprehensible chaos. But, from this notion, as from Heidegger and Sartre's concept of "nothingness:, the idea of individual responsibility arises. If each of us can do or be anything, then, we must make choices based on kindness to forge a existence that is humane and sustainable. The movie adopts the rather saccharine idea that family ties are perpetual and immortal -- ultimately the bonds are what creates meaning in the wild cyclone of the multiverse is family. (There's an early scene in which someone accuses Becky or Joy of wearing her "best Mormon clothes" -- clearly, there's an arcane Mormon correlate to what we see on the screen: in Mormon theology every believer ends up becoming a God controlling his or her own multiverse and the only thing that binds these worlds together is the perpetuity of covenanted family relationships: marriages and family ties are eternal. This explains the dread with which Waymond's decision to divorce Evelyn is greeted in the movie.)
In form, the film is loud, spectacular with lots of impressively choreographed, although ultimately pointless fights. The film's sense of bureaucratic chaos is similar to what we see in Terry Gilliam's great Brazil -- if the multiverse is anything it's a huge gloomy Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The movie's blithe tone reminds me of the cult picture The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Fifth Dimension, probably a useless reference because very few people have seen that film. There are good lines: Deirdre commiserating with Evelyn that "unlovable bitches like us make the world go 'round," and there are a number of fortune-cookie aphorisms about freedom and the void. The contrasts between the different multiverses, which have different color schemes and cinematography is remarkable, Evelyn is either the proprietress of failing business living in cramped apartments above her laundromat or a movie star (like Michelle Yeoh who plays her) feted by all and famous for her kung fu and martial arts expertise. In some ways, the movie reverts to ancient Christian ideas -- the world, the vale of human choice between two stony eternities is a garden of branching paths and each fork that we take is infinitely consequential. The film is directed by The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) and they are obviously moviemakers to be applauded for this picture and whose next movie, I suspect, will be intensely anticipated.
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